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(1)
One
of the issues most closely associated with the transition to socialism is
“the dictatorship of the proletariat”.
In Marxist theory, the transition to socialism is meant to come about
through the eruption of the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working
class, or proletariat, whereby state power would pass into the hands of the
proletariat.
The latter would exercise its dictatorship until it triumphs over all
the other classes which remain in society even after the proletariat assumes
power as residuals of a long, deep-rooted past.
During that phase, all power would be in the hands of the proletariat
to enable it to accomplish its historic task,
that of eliminating all classes antagonistic to the working class. 83
Once it has accomplished its mission, its dictatorship will come to an end,
since no other classes will exist and the state apparatus will fall, along
with the entire system of laws, when all men (those who remain!) will have
attained the highest stage of communism.
Briefly,
that is the idea of the `dictatorship of the proletariat', its rationale,
functions and fate.
To show how basic this idea is to the whole structure of marxist
ideology, and to leave no room for the argument that its repudiation is a
development within the framework of the marxist theory itself and not a
blatant contradiction of its very foundations,
let us turn to the words of Marx himself.
In
a letter postmarked London,
Karl Marx wrote
to Joseph Wiedmeyer in New York on March 5, 1852, affirming that
"The class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the
proletariat". 84 Twenty-three years later, in his `Critique of
the Gotha Programme' published
in 1875, he wrote: "Between capitalist and
communist society
lies the period of the revolutionary transition of the one into the
other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which
the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the
proletariat." 85Communist leaders in many parts of the world
still declare their total adherence to that belief; some even hold that the
dictatorship of the proletariat must continue beyond the transition to
socialism, at long as capitalism remains strong in the world. 86
(2)
Contemporary
socialist experiments are still at the stage of the dictatorship of the
proletariat.
However, nowhere has the proletariat come to power through a long
struggle against capitalism, nor through the eruption of the struggle in the
form of a violent workers' revolution.
Rather, it has always seized power either through military coups or
through takeovers by communist parties supported by Soviet military
presence, and then in countries that did not go through the stage of
capitalist development in the orthodox marxist sense of the word.
In
other words, the accession to power by these dictatorships did not proceed
in the manner envisaged by Marx.
Another glaring discrepancy between the theory he expounded and its application
in practice is that not one of the dictatorships of the proletariat existing
in countries of the socialist bloc can claim to have been established by the
working class.
In the Soviet Union, for example, the leaders of the Bolshevik party
all came either from the middle or upper-middle class.
Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Kaganovitch and other Bolshevik leaders who
laid the foundations of the dictatorship of the proletariat
in the Soviet Union were all middle class
intellectuals, many of them Russian Jews from professional and merchant
families. The
same applies to those who created dictatorships of the proletariat in the rest
of the socialist countries, including those in the Third World.
In Cuba, for example, the dictatorship of the proletariat was
established by members of the upper middle class, by the sons of rich families
who had been sent to European capitals for their studies, a great luxury in
such poor societies.
What
does dictatorship of the proletariat really mean?
According to
Marxists, it is a dictatorship exercised by the majority in the
interest of the majority and against all the classes and groups opposed to
those interests. If that is so, why
is the majority
represented at the higher echelons of the communist party by only a
few who are selected in a particular manner? Why does the majority in its
entirety not enter into the communist party?
Especially since Marxists absolutely reject the idea of
representational democracy which is the basis of the western parliamentary
system. Why,
if not for the fact that their dictatorship is directed against the
proletariat itself in the name of the proletariat.
Can anyone maintain that Stalin's regime of violent repression was
directed only against the non-proletarian classes in the Soviet Union and that
it did not affect the entire population? In fact, the leadership of this
regime, like that of every other dictatorship of the proletariat, was made up
of members of the middle class who
took it upon
themselves to protect the interests of the working class
in the face of all other classes.
An
important development in this respect is that communist parties in most of the
industrialized countries, the very climate for socialism according to marxist
theory, have, one after the other, abandoned the idea of dictatorship of the
proletariat87, declaring that the transition to socialism does not
have to come
about through class struggle and that, if they ever came to power, they would
not establish a dictatorship of the proletariat to abolish all other classes.
To
destroy the idea of dictatorship of the proletariat is to destroy the backbone
of marxist political thought as elaborated by Marx, Engels, Lenin and all
other marxist theoreticians over a whole century.
For without the dictatorship of the proletariat, the other classes will
not be abolished and, consequently, humanity will not attain a classless
society. As
Marx himself had firmly rejected the idea of "the free people's
state" advocated by Ferdinand Lassalle, this meant the collapse of the
following basic tenets of marxist thought:
The
repudiation of this basic tenet of marxist thinking by the communist parties
of western Europe and other parts of the developed world is due to several
factors:
First,
the democratic climate prevailing in Europe.
Western Europe is solidly anchored in parliamentary democracy, in
freedom of thought and opinion and in all other human rights and hence, by its
very nature, cannot subscribe to any theory that would destroy such democracy
and freedoms.
This climate of freedom and democracy has imposed itself even on the
communist parties of western Europe and on the staunchest supporters of
Marxism in western Europe88 and in other parts of the world, like
Japan.
It
may have been easy for the peoples of Russia, the Ukraine, Georgia, Siberia
or the Caucasus to accept a dictatorship of the proletariat sixty years ago,
or to accept the crimes of a tyrant like Stalin who liquidated scores of his
closest comrades and millions of those who opposed his views89.
After all, they were peoples who had known nothing but autocratic
rulers and
slavery through the centuries90.
The history of tsarist Russia is a chronicle of brutal repression: one
example that comes to mind here is the story of Spiratsky, the nineteenth
century
Russian minister who tried to introduce French laws into Russia and who
was exiled to Siberia for his pains!
For a nation whose
historical frame of reference is a saga of harsh dictatorships, the
dictatorship of the proletariat was no more than a
new name for an age-old pattern.
The
communist parties of Western Europe are far more aware than leftist movements
in the third world of the negative consequences that will inevitably follow
on the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat in their countries.
They know that they can only come to power through a coalition with
other parties and that there can be no question of those parties accepting
adictatorship of the proletariat.
Thus they would have nowhere to turn for help but to the Soviets and,
given the liberalism of the leaders of communist parties in western Europe
(their birthright as citizens of a democratic civilization), as well as the
lessons drawn from the recent past, this is unlikely to be an attractive
prospect.
Western
Europe has not forgotten the lessons learnt from the Soviet invasion of
Hungary and Czechoslovakia, from Soviet exploitation of the economies of
eastern Europe and from Tito's experience with the Soviets when he aspired
to a degree of independence for his country. Not only was he expelled from
the Cominform, but Yugoslavia was subjected to strong economic pressure from
the Soviet Union and other member countries of the Comicon.91
There are many other examples attesting to the perils of falling out
with the Soviets. 92
Second,
the failure of this basic tenet of marxist ideology to move from the realm of
the theoretical to that of the applied. The socialist experience has proved to
the communist parties of western Europe and other parts of the developed world
that the elimination by the proletariat of all other classes and its attainment
of the highest stage of communism when there will be no antagonistic classes,
no state and no law, but one single class living in peace, was no more than
wishful thinking, a naive illusion that has not materialized nor shows the
slightest indication of ever doing so in any part of the world.
Classes still exist in the socialist countries, albeit under new
guises, the state has become stronger and more centralized, laws are gradually
coming closer to West European legal theories and many other marxist
expectations appear to be as illusory and elusive as the utopian dreams of
Thomas More.
One
such expectation, confidently predicted by Lenin in 1917, was that World War I
would put such unbearable pressure on the industrial capitalist states that
the only way out of the crisis would be through the proletarian revolution.
Events have since proved the fallacy of that analysis and we have yet
to see a proletarian revolution in any large industrial state.
93 Another such expectation, announced by the well-known
Bolshevik, Zinoviev,
in 1918, was that within one year all of Europe would become communist!94
Only one year earlier, Zinoviev, together with Kamenev, considered that
the bourgeois Russian Revolution of March 1917 should not transcend its
historical limits and become
a proletarian revolution too rapidly on the grounds
that such a revolution would fail without the support of a general
communist revolution in western Europe!
The
expectation that a proletarian revolution would break out in all parts of
Europe was not confined to Lenin and Zinoviev, it was shared by all the
leaders of the Bolshevik revolution and by all European communists. 95&96
That preposterous expectation persisted until the early thirties, when it
became clear to the communist movement in Russia and throughout the world that
a proletarian revolution in western Europe or anywhere else in the developed
capitalist world was an impossibility.
Having come to that conclusion, they had to revise their views on other
matters as well.
Thus, after holding that the building of socialism in Russia was
dependent on the revolutions to be led by western workers, they now claimed
that it was the latter who needed the Russian experience to sustain, assist
and support them.
This
new rationale marked the beginning of a new relationship between Soviet
Russia and the West.
The Soviet Union had to ensure its security in a world that did not
seem to be moving, as had been expected, towards a proletarian revolution.
Stalin signed several treaties with Germany, then with the allies after
World War II, in a bid to expand his boundaries and set up a wall of socialist
states to serve as a buffer between the Soviet Union and western Europe.
At a later stage, starting in the seventies, the Soviet Union sought a
modus vivendi with the West, deferring its old dream to some distant future
and resorting to covert methods of operation.
One
European Marxist who did not share the belief of Marxist leaders in the Soviet
Union and throughout Europe that capitalism was about to collapse, that the
proletarian revolution was about to break out and that the dictatorship of the
proletariat would be established in capitalist Europe, was Antonio Gramsci,
secretary-general of the Italian Communist Party, who was imprisoned in 1928
and died in prison in 1937.
He showed a more realistic grasp of the situation when he said that the
path of the western proletariat towards power and dictatorship was fraught
with defeat.
Third,
the disappearance from the developed countries of the working class described
by Engels in “The Condition of the Working class in England” and on whom
Marx focused all his studies.
The proletariat Marx and Engels knew in the nineteenth century was an
exploited working class performing hard manual labour in difficult and
primitive working conditions, totally devoid of any guarantees or social
security. Such
a class no longer exists in the industrialized capitalist world 97,
as it did in Munich, Lyons, Manchester, Leeds, London and other large
industrial cities of the nineteenth century.
There is no longer any trace of those workers in today's factories,
where there is no proletariat in the technical sense of the
term but, rather, employees engaged for the most
part in non-manual work.
In
conclusion, the proletariat which toiled under such unspeakable conditions in
the last century is a class that does not exist in the industrialized
capitalist countries of our age, where technological advances are ushering in
an age of industry without workers, where
mental work will replace the manual work performed by
Marx's proletariat.
A
visit to any factory in a large industrial city today will corroborate the
fact that today's working conditions are nothing like those which prevailed in
the nineteenth century, that an entire system of social guarantees and
security is provided to the workers of today, one that is certainly not
enjoyed by their counterparts in the industrialized socialist countries.
Consequently, there is no need for the communist parties of western
Europe to advocate the dictatorship of a class that no longer exists in
developed capitalist systems.
Fourth,
the disintegration of the idea of dictatorship of the proletariat is also due
to an important economic fact, namely, that the economic hopes pinned by the
early marxist theoreticians on the stages during which the proletariat would
be in control have failed to materialize.
Marxists believe that between capitalism and communism, socities will
go through a transitional tage, the post-capitalist socialist stage. During
that transitional stage, the workers, through the dictatorship of the
proletariat, would control all aspects of life, including the economy.
They would strive to achieve greater growth to realize maximum
productivity, the material basis for the establishment of the higher stage of
communism, for it is through the realization of such maximum productivity that
society can move from the socialist principle of `each according to his work'
to the communist principle of each “according to his need”.
It
is a fact that the dictatorship of the proletariat in Soviet Russia has not
realized that dream.
Even the progress achieved by the Soviet Union today, in comparison
with the conditions which held in Russia prior to the Bolshevik revolution,
cannot be considered an achievement of the dictatorship of the Soviet
proletariat.
The
capacity of the dictatorship of the Soviet proletariat can only be measured in
terms of the level of growth reached by the Soviet economy (i.e., the level of
development of productive forces) in the early days of World War II, because
it is only up to that point in time that the growth of the Soviet economy can
be credited solely to Soviet economic orientations.
Whatever progress was achieved after the war is due to other factors we
shall come to further on.
In
the period between 1917 and 1941, the Soviet economy achieved noticeable
growth. Yet
the degree of growth cannot be compared to that of the western world nor even
to the present rate of growth achieved by the Soviet Union. It was closer to
the present rate of growth in the countries of Eastern Europe.
Thus while the dictatorship of the Soviet proletariat did achieve a
certain degree of progress because of economic planning and the protection of
the new regime,
that progress was never up to the level
of what the Soviet Union achieved after the war.
It had also begun to slow down noticeably just before the war, when
Soviet industry began to slacken in the mid-thirties in terms of investments
and development rates.
Investments which had been growing until 1936 began to decrease
systematically as indicated by the following statistics:
Year |
Volume
of Investments |
1933
|
2350
million roubles |
1934 |
2552
"
" |
1936 |
4621
"
" |
1937 |
3621
"
" |
1938 |
3807
"
" |
Investment
in the iron and steel industry alone (by
far the most important of the heavy industries) decreased by 35% from
1935 to 1936.
This downward trend continued until the late thirties. 98
Figures definitely point to growth between 1917 and 1936, but to a rate of
growth not comparable to that attained by the Soviet Union after the war.
Moreover, growth receded from the mid-thirties to the beginning of the
war. The
decline continued during the war, but that was due to a concentration on the
war industries and to the huge losses in factories and agricultural land
incurred as a result of the sweeping German invasion.
So
much for the economic achievements of the dictatorship of the Soviet
proletariat before the Second World War.
As to the development of the Soviet economy after the war, this was due
to several factors:
The
thirteen European provinces annexed by the Soviet Union immediately after the
war covered a total area of more than 270,000 square miles, an area greater
than the Iberian Peninsula, while the Asian provinces of Manchuria were
extremely rich in mineral wealth and water. 104
From
the above, it is clear that the economic performance of the dictatorship of
the Soviet proletariat can be divided into two distinct stages:
A
first stage of steady progress followed by a decline just before World War II.
The progress itself was modest and far from what had been expected from
the dictatorship of the proletariat.
It was noticeable only because Russia was so far behind the countries
of Europe. At
any rate, it was not an encouraging sign for the European Marxists, who found
little in the economic performance of the dictatorship of the proletariat in
the Soviet Union or, for that matter, in any country of eastern Europe, to
justify the expectation that this dictatorship could realize the material
basis for the establishment of the higher phase of communism.
A
second stage of far greater progress that was not, however, due to the
intrinsic strength of the Soviet system but, rather, to many external factors
without which the Soviet economy would have totally collapsed.
This is not an idle assertion but one that is substantiated by facts.
Fact No. 1: the enormous difference between the economic performance of
the Soviet Union in the period between 1917 and 1941 and its performance in
the post-war period up to the present day.
Where during the first period progress was slow and nearly ground to a
halt as the momentum of the revolution waned, in the second period it surged
forward in leaps and bounds.
This dramatic upsurge can only be explained by
the external factors we have mentioned, whose role in bolstering the
Soviet economy cannot be over-emphasized.
Fact No. 2: the countries of eastern Europe, which did not benefit from
the exceptional circumstances available to the Soviet Union after World War II
but had to fall back on their own resources, have been able to generate only
minimal economic growth, their modest economies able only to provide their
peoples with the bare necessities, exactly the same situation which existed in
the Soviet
Union before the war.
That
is not to say that even at the present rate of growth of the Soviet economy
the standard of living of a Soviet citizen is not far below that of an
ordinary citizen in any advanced industrial country.
He is still far from obtaining what a simple worker in those countries
has access to in the way of basic necessities, let alone luxuries.
It may be useful to give the reader an idea of the standard of living
in an advanced industrial country to show that the Soviet experience, at
least in its economic aspect, was not an encouraging example to follow for
societies which
had far surpassed the inferior living standard of the Soviet citizen centuries
before:
Between
1950 and 1975, the following developments took place in France:
-
despite
the apparent steep increase in prices between 1956 and 1976, the price of
food is considered to have decreased from 100 to 53, while the prices of
manufactured goods decreased from 100 to 41.5, bearing in mind the
increase in incomes, e.g., equipment that a Frenchman could have obtained
in 1956
at the cost of 100 hours, he obtained in 1976 at the cost of only 41.5
hours;
According
to the statistics of the Soviet state itself, the Soviet people do not enjoy
10% of the comforts enjoyed by the French people.
While the above statistics speak for themselves, two observations are
in order here:
First,
the failure of the dictatorship of the proletariat to achieve anywhere near as
high a standard of living as that achieved under the capitalist systems of
western Europe led European communists to question the validity of this
key section of Marxist-Leninist theory.
Second, the French statistics show to what extent social classes are
drawing closer together: whereas the percentage of car-owners among senior
civil servants rose by 21% between 1953 and 1972, it rose by 55% among the
working class during the same period.
These
statistics not only indicate a rapprochement between the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie, they also disprove one of Marx's pet theories, viz, that
industrial societies are divided into only two classes:
a poor class which works and does not own (the proletariat) and a rich
class which owns and does not work (the capitalist class).
All other classes are reduced to the level of the proletariat, which
would be getting ever poorer while the capitalist bourgeoisie would become
ever richer. The French statistics turn this theory on its head: it seems the
proletariat is catching up with the privileges of the upper classes, that it
is getting richer, not poorer, and that it is getting richer at a rate that is
bringing it ever closer to the bourgeoisie, contrary to Marx's predictions. 106
Finally,
in a shrinking world where the tremendous development of the communications
industry makes it impossible to keep any situation secret, the walls with
which the Soviet Union surrounded itself for so long have come crashing down.
As a result, the working classes in the advanced industrial countries
are now well aware that their situation
is far better, both economically and politically, than that of their
counterparts in the socialist countries.
The
shattering of the great economic hopes placed in the dictatorship of the
proletariat was the main factor that led to the collapse of the idea itself,
as workers in the advanced industrialized countries asked themselves how the
deprivation they see their brothers suffering from in the socialist countries
can ever become the material basis for the higher stage
of communism, when each will get according to his needs.
In addition to all the above, communist parties in several parts of the world
rejected the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat as totally
inappropriate for the non-industrial societies of Asia and Africa in which
communists did manage to seize power.
With peasants and farmers representing the majority of the population,
the formula of a dictatorship of the proletariat seemed contrived and
essentially flawed.
This led several agricultural countries under communist rule, China
being the most notable example, to introduce changes into the Marxist theory
which, in our opinion, have shaken it to its very foundations.
One is entitled to question how there could be a dictatorship of the
proletariat in countries where there are no workers in the Marxist sense of
industrial workers, and where an entire stage in the socio-economic evolution
of society as advocated by Marx has been skipped, namely, the stage of
capitalism out of the womb of which socialism is born. 107
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